Weeding out narco-nurseries
Anger over reports about a kindergarten in New Taipei City giving sedatives to children continues to grow. On Friday last week, Vice Premier Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) said during an interview that the government is looking into its administrative processes to see whether a lack of oversight was involved.
Cheng added that the incident should never have been allowed to happen in the first place, and that after it had occurred there should not have been a delay of 25 days before anything was done about it.
It was only on Thursday last week that the city government revoked the school’s license after the case was investigated and it received the documents.
At least one doctor has raised suspicions that this might not be an isolated case, that it could just be the tip of the iceberg — an “unspeakable secret” among kindergarten teachers.
How can it be that kindergarten teachers could have such easy access to controlled, high-risk drugs? How could they have the audacity to use them on children, without stopping to think about the gravity of what they were doing? And why is it that the New Taipei City Education Bureau delayed intervention for weeks after being notified?
The kindergarten teachers who gave the sedatives to the children in their charge should be punished according to the law, but at the same time it is important to address the underlying systemic problems that allowed the incident to happen in the first place.
It is crucial that the culprits are held accountable to ensure that our children and grandchildren can grow up safely without their health being harmed.
Tsai Mei-chu
New Taipei City
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